I was recently at an event where we played a game of giving a new-age twist of old proverbs. The one that I was given was: Necessity is the mother of invention. My new-age version of it is the title of this article.

I believe we have enough of everything. We are not inventing any new things because they are a necessity; we are inventing them because of the greed to make more and more money out of them.

We don’t need more tech. We don’t need AI; not in its most-used gen-AI form, especially not given the amount of resources it uses. AI will contribute to faster climate change, depletion of water and higher generation of power, among other things. Why? So that you can write a better email that no one is going to read. So that some random Indian guy can as Grok on Twitter (yes, Twitter, I refuse to use its stripper name) to change Tamannaah Bhatia’s saree picture into a bikini picture. So that marketing teams can generate videos and images faster, which are not even as good as the ones created by humans. We don’t need this AI. We need AI to solve real problems, to find cures for life-threatening diseases, to end hunger, to bring peace in the world. But AI, on the other hand, is making it easier for countries to bomb other countries.

We don’t need more types of food. We need better utilization of the food we produce because we have food that gets wasted and mouths that go unfed. We don’t need protein in everything and we don’t need it to be delivered to us in an instant. Companies are “solving” for the protein needs of the affluent because there’s money in it. No one is building anything to eradicate hunger because there’s no money in that.

We don’t need new cars. What we absolutely do not need is cars with screens on the dashboard. Has no one even given a thought to how catastrophic that is! Being on our phones causes accidents; we all know that. But we’re still on our phones all the time while driving. And now we will be operating other screens while driving! That’s insane. We don’t need more of these cars. We don’t need 3 types of SUVs from the same manufacturer.

We don’t need more hospitals or more medicines. We need less diseases and fewer illnesses. We now have influencers telling us to take melatonin for better sleep but we don’t have anyone telling us to stop doomscrolling at bedtime. Ironically, we are looking at reels of these influencers talking about melatonin because we are unable to sleep. Guess why? Guess where the money is. Why is there cancer care but no cancer cure?

We don’t need more clothes or shoes or bags or jewellery. We don’t need new fashion. We don’t need new cafes and restaurants. We don’t need new malls to house these eateries and retail outlets.

We don’t need new gadgets. We don’t need a new version of the iPhone every year or the 57th version in Samsung’s Galaxy series. We don’t need an iPad (I’ve personally realised this twice). Why can’t Apple launch a new iPhone every 3 years? Because coming out with a new one every year makes more business sense.

We don’t need cricket matches all year round. We don’t need a T20 World Cup every 2 years or a domestic T20 tournament with 70+ matches stretching over 2 months every single year! We need to play more sports than we watch.

We don’t need more social media. We don’t need easier access to superfast internet that keeps us online for longer and longer. We don’t need more reels or videos or opinions by everyone with a keyboard. Honestly, we don’t even need more blogs like this one. But that’s what we get because our poor social lives makes them richer.

All of the things that I’ve written about here, we don’t need them, but we might want them. Therein lies the difference – between need and want. You might want the new car or new tshirt or new coffee or new LLM or new gadget or the new whatever, but you don’t need any of it. And more than anything else, you need to stop wanting them. Think about that for a second.

There are a lot of things that we don’t need and even more things that we do need. Like walkable cities, public transport, conscious tech, breathable air, disposable gadgets, healthier lifestyles, human connections. But we’re given what makes money for corporations, and hence, greed is the mother of invention.